Raise a glass to beer made from festival urine

It may sound gross, but pee from Denmark's Roskilde Festival will help the environment.

Tasty! Would you want to know if your beer was made from urine?
(Photo: kazoka/Shutterstock)

I’ve written about human urine as crop fertilizer before. “Pee-cycling” is a term used by Vermont’s Earth Institute for its program that recycles urine into fertilizer for gardens and farms. The nitrogen and phosphorous that are found in urine are very useful, natural fertilizers.

So as gross as it sounds, the "beercycling”
program that’s happening in Denmark at the Roskilde Festival is really a smart and sustainable idea. Being dubbed “from piss to pilsner,” the organizers of the festival
collected the urine from more than 100,000 festivalgoers. “Well appointed” bathrooms contained storage tanks that were specially made to collect the urine.

Organizers even put the special bathrooms near the stage for the performers, hoping to collect the urine of singers like Pharrell Williams, Sir Paul McCartney and Kendrick Lamar.

The urine will be used to fertilize barley that’s grown in fields near the festival grounds.

Aside from being a smart reuse of human urine, the beercycling efforts keep the waste of 100,000 or so people out of the sewage system. Instead of having a negative
impact on the environment, it will have a positive impact by being used as a natural fertilizer.